Rob Kerry of Ayami Search on CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO

The 1st session in the Technical SEO Track is “CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO” by Rob Kerry, Head of Search at Ayami Search
Rob is an digital marketing consultant specialising in Search Engine Optimisation. Currently based out of London, he has over 8 years of experience in traffic generation and conversion boosting online
You can chat with Rob on Twitter.
Geeks perfected the perfect web. They created mostly text based web pages, html TABLES were used for data and sites were designed with Library style indexing and navigation
But then marketers ruined everything, Microsoft Frontpage created uncrawlable sites and corporate designers became obsessed with flash
CSS was used to try and solve these problems
It separated content from code, made search engines job easier and replaced old image navigation buttons with CSS styling & hover effects therefore search engines recognise the navigation links
Unfortunately CSS was also used to hide dodgy content offscreen using code like “display:none” and “margin-left:-2000px to show users one type of content and search engines another type of contentAJAX
Fetches data without loading a web page. Don’t overuse it.
Good uses of Ajax are data grids/sort tabular data, shopping baskets, form verification
Bad uses of AJAX are content tabs (not indexable), search results (no back button), product listings (cant bookmark specific lists)
User generated content
Is free content – but not free to manage – you will need to budget for a moderator. Communities need a lot of hand holding and Rob stresses the importance of watching for dodgy links in users comments. [C’mon people, wake up and smell the comment spam! Auto rel=nofollow=solution – Kate]Syndication
RSS can stimulate regular visitors who end to link to sites more often than other readers. API’s stimulate buzz and open up some of you data/content to be used on other sites with a link back to your canonical authoritative version

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